Inside Dope

Mark Halperin and the transformation of the Washington establishment.

“There is always some new tidbit,” Mark Halperin said. “You just have to ferret it out.” It was the first day of the Republican Convention, in New York, and although the sun had not yet risen, he had already laid out all he needed for his peculiar trade—three television monitors, a laptop, a BlackBerry, a cell phone, a pager—in a makeshift space on the fifth floor of Madison Square Garden. Outside the Washington establishment, Halperin is known, if at all, as a journalist (his official title is political director of ABC News), but within it he is considered the leading purveyor of inside dope. As the founder of The Note, a political news digest that appears on the ABC News Web site each weekday morning by eleven o’clock, he collects information the way bookies keep tabs on the latest odds, or photographers chase the fading light. He collects polling data, no matter what the time of year or the size of the sample. He collects any rise or fall—even the smallest blip—in the projected electoral count. He also collects dirt, such as the unsealed divorce records of Jack Ryan, a Senate candidate from Illinois, which detailed visits to an alleged “sex club,” and which forced Ryan out of the race. He collects other things, too: arcane statistics from documents that government agencies churn out but few read; embargoed political books (The Note footnoted Kitty Kelley’s gossipy portrait of the Bush family twenty-four hours before it was released, beneath the teaser “Here Kitty, Kitty”); wire reports; radio transcripts; pieces of legislation; the guest lists of Georgetown dinner parties; and other minutiae that are of little interest to the ordinary citizen but are essential to his calling (“2:00 p.m.: Sen. John Kerry and his family hold a barbeque at the Heinz Farm, Fox Chapel, Pa”). Mostly, though, Halperin collects leaks and scuttlebutt from the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment, or what Halperin calls “the Gang of 500.”

“We try to channel what the chattering class is chattering about, and to capture the sensibility, ethos, and rituals of the Gang of 500, which still largely sets the political agenda for the country,” Halperin explained during one of several recent conversations.

Mary Matalin, a campaign adviser to President Bush, described Halperin as “the insider’s insider’s insider” and the readership of The Note as a kind of “Skull and Bones for the political class.” The Note is written in a runic argot that is often incomprehensible to the outsider. A typical edition includes comments like this one:

Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, is sometimes described as S.M.I.P. (“smartest man in politics”), and Kerry’s former campaign manager Jim Jordan as S.S.M.I.P. (“second smartest man in politics”). Halperin’s references can be so obscure that they baffle even members of the Gang of 500. Recently, after The Note joked that a cabal of left-wing journalists was holding meetings, “per usual,” on the top floor of Lauriol Plaza, a Mexican restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, Rush Limbaugh announced on his radio show that he finally had proof of a liberal-media conspiracy. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . it’s been admitted to, if I’m reading this correctly, by ABC’s The Note,” he said.

ABC does not release the number of hits that The Note receives each day, but it is believed to be about thirty thousand—less than one per cent of the readership of the Times. Yet its readers are, as Halperin puts it, “among the most sought-after eyeballs in the country.” And the Note’s very knowingness about those in the know has made it, since its creation, in January, 2002, the most influential tip sheet in Washington. “The President has the P.D.B., the Presidential Daily Briefing, where the C.I.A. takes all its information and gives it to the President,” Paul Begala, a former campaign adviser to Bill Clinton and a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” told me. “For everyone else in Washington, Halperin and The Note are our version of the P.D.B.” Bill and Hillary Clinton are said to read it, as do Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, and Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic National Committee; when Rove is on the road, he has a printout sent to him.

In each edition, The Note tries to offer a comprehensive repository of political news, with Web links to what it considers the “must reads” in major and minor newspapers, and summaries of ephemera from cable news, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Its original reporting is often based on leaks from unnamed sources. During the Democratic primary season, the Howard Dean campaign spent months futilely trying to find out who kept sending Halperin its internal memoranda.

Many of The Note’s scoops are presented in riddle form. On August 19th, after The Note learned that the Kerry campaign was about to hire two former Clinton advisers, Joel Johnson and Joe Lockhart, it broke the news with the headline “Pick Up Hazy Joely and Killer Joe.” Buried in that day’s edition was another hint: “There are those who are Harbouring a willingness to Park themselves at 15th and Eye Streets.” When I asked Halperin to decode these allusions, he explained that Johnson worked at the Harbour Group, a consulting firm, and that Lockhart was an employee at another consulting firm, the Glover Park Group; Kerry’s campaign headquarters is at the corner of Fifteenth and I Streets. Halperin explained further that Lockhart was a Bruce Springsteen fan, and that the headline was a play on the song “Spirit in the Night,” which includes the lyric “We’ll pick up Hazy Davy and Killer Joe.” (After the item appeared, another Web site for political devotees, wonkette.com, mockingly solved the puzzle with an entry entitled “Translating The Note.”)

Weeks earlier, Halperin had offered clues to a more important mystery—Kerry’s choice of running mate. Halperin and ABC News had assigned a reporter to tail each potential nominee around the clock, and The Note was the first to determine that Kerry had visited former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s home late one night to meet with his choice. Initially, The Note suspected that it was Richard Gephardt who had somehow slipped, undetected, through the door. Then, the next day, under the headline “Georgetown Alley Cat,” it published the sentence “Gift to our competitors: the key to the whole Veepstakes puzzle might just be found by clicking on this link.” The link connected readers to a page from an Indonesian travel Web site, featuring the following text: “Distance between Washington, District of Columbia, United States, and Orlando, Florida, United States . . . 759 miles.” For The Note’s savviest readers, the message was clear: Senator John Edwards, who had been vacationing at Disney World, had made a clandestine trip to Washington to meet with Kerry at Albright’s home, and was thus the nominee. As Halperin told me, “The Note can function on at least two levels—something for insiders and something for hyper-insiders.”

It was so early at Madison Square Garden that the arena was all but empty. Given the amount of information that Halperin has to consume daily, he told me, he has had to synchronize his “biological rhythms with the news cycle, so that information is not lying out there unanalyzed for too long.” He measures time not by conventional units—hours, minutes—but by news programs. “Twelve o’clock for a normal person might be ‘Let’s think about having lunch,’ but for me it’s ‘Rush Limbaugh is on,’ ” he said. “Six-thirty is not dinnertime; it’s time for Peter, Dan, and Tom.”

Technology has both liberated and tyrannized Halperin, at once allowing him to move from Washington to Manhattan—“my dirty little secret”—and inundating him with an ever-greater, faster barrage of data. In his New York office, amid piles of campaign memorabilia, he has mounted six television screens, each tuned to a different news channel, and he has learned to watch them all simultaneously. He can read and send e-mails on his BlackBerry, even as he does live television interviews (though he tries to wait until a cutaway). He carries newspapers rolled under his arm, the way an architect totes his drawings, so that during free moments—the six minutes it takes (he’s timed it) to get from his apartment to the newsroom, say, or at 5 a.m. on the StairMaster, before the “Imus in the Morning” radio show—he can absorb new information. He also depends on his longtime girlfriend, Karen Avrich, who works as a researcher on nonfiction books, as “a fail-safe system” to catch details that he might miss. In addition, he has a small team of young reporters, who share the burden of producing The Note, and who are often, to their chagrin, mistaken for “the Googling monkeys,” a term that Halperin jokingly invokes in his newsletter to explain the mystifying way in which The Note processes so much information. “I couldn’t do this alone,” Halperin said. “Ten papers, maybe twenty—but not fifty.”

Halperin, who is thirty-nine, is invariably described by those who know him as a “political junkie” or a “political animal.” Both terms rankle him. “People don’t describe sports fans or historians as junkies or animals,” he said. Yet, in order to avoid missing a single moment of the news cycle, he has forsaken much that he used to enjoy: sports pages, novels, naps, uninterrupted vacations, Broadway shows, leisurely walks, silence. Halperin admits that his singular fixation sometimes gives him a feeling of “psychological oppression.” Dan Balz, the veteran Washington Post reporter, says, “Politics is his life, in a way that I certainly don’t even come close to.” During the 1992 campaign, he was on the phone so much that he damaged his vocal cords. The Democratic strategist Chris Lehane insists that, based on the evidence, “the man doesn’t sleep.”

Still, Halperin has tried to swear off caffeine, which he considers poison. “Many people believe you can’t cover politics without caffeine,” he said. “It’s one of my little challenges.” He will find himself, as he did during the Democratic Convention, starting to slip with a Diet Coke, then another. “I try to resist,” he said. “But, as Election Day approaches and I’m putting myself at a competitive disadvantage, I begin to drink it again.”

Lately, Halperin has been offering more on-air political commentary on ABC; he has cut his black hair like an anchorman, and lost thirty pounds by reducing his consumption of carbs. (He calls it “the Newt Gingrich diet.”) These cosmetic changes aside, he cannot hide that he is of a different breed from many television reporters. His nose is both large and slightly crooked, like a boxer’s; he tends to grow a five-o’clock shadow by two o’clock, and he sweats even when it’s cold. An introvert, he sometimes has trouble when the conversation wanders from politics, as if he were caught in the elevator with a stranger. He compensates in such moments with wit. In fact, he has become an uncanny mimic of the politicians he covers; his impression of Al Gore is considered as sharp as any that have appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

Yet it is his understanding of politics that distinguishes him. Begala said, “Halperin is the best. No. 1, he lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes it. No. 2, he’s smarter than the average bear. He can sense where a political story or line of argument is going, and he can remember details from a campaign that took place decades ago.”

At 6 a.m., Halperin began sorting through hundreds of press releases that he had received via e-mail: “Rumsfeld Said U.S. Was Prepared for ‘Catastrophic Success’ ”; “Remarks of Senator John Edwards”; “Press Schedule of Mrs. Bush.”

“You have to be relentless and disciplined about your in-box,” he said. “Just the press releases alone can swamp you.” There was also a constant flow of “pool reports”—summaries from the rotating group of reporters who accompany the President of the United States (potus) or the First Lady (flotus) to private events. He had one from the day before that said, “potus . . . escorted flotus, wearing a gray pantsuit, out of a black S.U.V. and into the chapel,” where “a boisterous toddler . . . made a brief run at the presidential pew.” Later, one came in from Nantucket, headlined “Wind Is Favorable,” and saying, “JK will test his brand spankin’ new windsurfer sail this afternoon. . . . If he’s brought close by the winds, we will toss a q [question].”

As Halperin deleted the more superfluous e-mails, he expressed a fear that, in his haste, he might have erased some divine piece of trivia that his readers might want to know. “We’re on a tight deadline,” he said. “There’s no margin for error.” As he watched the television monitors, spoke on the phone, wrote an e-mail, and ate a granola bar, he turned to a young reporter for The Note named Annie Chiappetta. Between them, they had already sifted through twenty papers, but, Halperin said, “we need more.” A runner was quickly dispatched to a newsstand and, moments later, returned with two dozen more papers. Halperin took a New York Post and rolled it under the crook of his arm. He paused by a cooler filled with drinks and looked at the Diet Cokes. After a moment of hesitation, he removed a bottle of water. As he opened it, his eyes caught the television monitors in the corner of the room. It was 7 a.m.—time for the morning shows. His eyes darted back and forth, as if he were watching a foreign film with rapid subtitles. Suddenly, he said, “Can you turn that up?”

On NBC’s “Today” show, Matt Lauer was interviewing President Bush, and had asked if the war on terrorism could be won. Bush replied, “I don’t think you can win it.” Halperin perked up. “Did you hear that?” he said. In an era of prepackaged rhetoric, there was nothing that delighted him as much as hearing a candidate saying something startling—something off message.

At the end of 2002, Halperin caught another, more devastating gaffe, and in the process established The Note as a new source of power in Washington. On December 5th—at the hundredth-birthday party for Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who ran for President in 1948 as a staunch segregationist— Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican, who was about to be sworn in as Senate Majority Leader, stood and delivered a now infamous statement: “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for President we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Though many members of the press listened to the speech, only ABC television offered a report on the remarks—a brief synopsis that aired at four-thirty in the morning. No other television outlet or newspaper mentioned them, and they seemed poised to vanish from the public record.

Then, on December 6th, Halperin highlighted the remarks in The Note. Within hours, Talking Points Memo, a liberal blog written by Joshua Micah Marshall, and Tapped, a blog put out by the left-leaning magazine The American Prospect, picked up the story. Crediting The Note, Tapped wrote, “What about the national media? . . . Trent Lott, soon to be the Senate’s majority leader, is caught on tape reminiscing fondly about a segregationist presidential campaign, and we hear nothing (although, since The Note is read widely, that might change).” Indeed, it soon did. That night, James Carville, the Democratic strategist, criticized Lott’s comments on “Crossfire.” Tom Edsall, a Washington Post reporter, also spotted Lott’s remarks in The Note. “I saw it in cold print, and it really stood out,” he said. “That’s when I got the sense that this deserved significant coverage.” Meanwhile, more and more bloggers began to quote Lott’s statement, while decrying the “old,” print-based media for its silence. The Drudge Report, which had helped establish the Internet as a new form of political grapevine during the Monica Lewinsky affair, also started to promote the story. As the scandal spread to all the major newspapers and cable channels, The Note collected items from these other outlets, which it posted on its site, thereby spreading the story further. On December 13th, under the headline “Never Like(d) Him: Lott Has a Gang of 200 Problem,” The Note crystallized how quickly sentiment in the political and media establishment had shifted:

First, our extrapolated survey of the Gang of 200—Al and Judy, Ben and Sally, and the rest of the Chattering Class elite (yes, even the media and political elite have an elite) who will be gathering at holiday festivities over the next several days—suggests that 90 percent of them think he will be forced out as leader, and 59 percent of them seem to think he should be.

Two weeks after The Note posted its story, Lott relinquished his leadership post. Halperin’s item was acknowledged as having incited what the New York Post called “The Internet’s First Scalp.” Most political strategists and reporters told me that that is the real power of The Note: a single item on its site can metastasize until it is picked up by more traditional media. Mickey Kaus, the author of Kausfiles, one of the first political blogs, once asked rhetorically, “If a tree falls in the forest, and The Note doesn’t cover it . . . does it make a sound?”

Since its role in the Lott scandal confirmed its influence, The Note has become a pivotal instrument in campaigns. Strategists not only deluge its reporters with faxes and e-mails; they also leak to it, hoping that their information will radiate out into the rest of the media. Political operatives are constantly trying to plant items with Halperin. Steve McMahon, a longtime Democratic media consultant who worked for Howard Dean during the primaries, told me, “If you want to drop something, dropping it in The Note can be as good as dropping it in the New York Times.” Moreover, unlike most newspapers, The Note does not require that its anonymous sources be at least partially described. As McMahon put it, “You can do it without leaving any fingerprints.”

During the Republican Convention, Karen Hughes, Bush’s longtime communications adviser, appeared on ABC with Peter Jennings and complained about how The Note increasingly sets the agenda for the rest of the political press corps. “I think the national media tends to run a little bit more in a pack,” she said. “My experience in the White House was that your colleague Mark Halperin was able to dictate a lot of the coverage by what he wrote in The Note, because all the political reporters in the country read The Note and so they would cover or ask questions that you suggested in The Note.”

Reporters and editors also seek, and even lobby, to be “noted” in The Note themselves, so that their stories will be picked up by other news outlets. And in Washington social circles being mentioned in The Note has become a status symbol—proof of one’s membership in the Gang of 500. In her new novel, “Sammy’s Hill,” Kristin Gore, the daughter of the former Vice-President, signals that her main character is a true insider by having her scan The Note.

Shortly after 9 a.m. at the Garden, Halperin and his colleagues were almost ready to hit the Send button on that morning’s edition. Chiappetta, referring to a top official in the Bush White House, said, “I’m still waiting to hear back.”

Halperin checked with her about another item: “Can we get that in? Is that on or off the record?”

A few minutes later, they had finished compiling and editing their report. Peter Jennings appeared, his face tinted beige with makeup, and conferred with Halperin about what they had. Most of the items were the usual fare: newspaper citations, summaries from the talk shows, offhand references to minor political figures (“Note to Debbie Dingell”). Then, in the middle of the text, Halperin inserted a question, based on a series of leaks: “Will John Kerry’s campaign use its week (mostly) out of the spotlight to make some staff changes?” He didn’t answer it or source it; he didn’t have to. Later, after he declared, “The Note is out,” and confirmed that it was posted on the Web site, he said, “Let’s see what happens.”

Halperin was born into the Washington establishment, and learned firsthand the power of inside information. His father, Morton H. Halperin, who is now sixty-six years old, was a protégé of the “wise men” who dominated the capital in the aftermath of the Second World War. (Halperin’s generation of policymakers was known as the Whiz Kids.) In 1967, when Halperin was twenty-nine, President Johnson appointed him Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense—then the youngest person ever to hold the job. He worked under men who embodied the Old Guard, such as Clark Clifford, Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, and John McCloy, a top Presidential adviser. If the establishment of McCloy and Clifford contained political operatives, it wasn’t defined by them; instead, it was ruled by a cluster of businessmen, lawyers, and foreign-policy experts who shaped American foreign policy during the Cold War and who, despite their enormous clout inside Washington, were relatively anonymous outside it. “These men did not adhere to a single ideology,” Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas wrote in the book “The Wise Men.” “Ideological fervor was frowned upon; pragmatism, realpolitik, moderation, and consensus were prized.”

Like others in the Johnson White House, Morton Halperin was a registered Republican. “My interest was much more in policymaking than in electoral politics,” he told me. “Most of the people I knew and dealt with didn’t have a clue how parties chose a candidate.” In 1969, when his son Mark was four, he joined the Nixon Administration, working for Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council.

Morton Halperin recalled that, in those days, the Times and the Washington Post were usually the only newspapers that the political class read. “You didn’t have VCRs, so most people who worked in Washington didn’t see the evening news, because you didn’t get home in time,” he said. “There wasn’t this obsession with having television sets in your office.”

Still, he said, each day Nixon was provided with “a summary,” a collection of clippings from the major newspapers, which he studied compulsively. Nixon wanted not only to possess information but to know who else held it—and, more important, who was leaking it. As he pursued the war in Vietnam, and often deceived the public, he began to fear that the White House was full of leakers, and it was not long before he suspected Morton Halperin, who had turned against the war and knew nearly as many secrets about it as anyone else in the Administration. Among other things, Halperin had supervised the writing of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret review of the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Although there was no evidence that Halperin had leaked any national-security secrets, on May 9, 1969, after the Times reported that the Administration had launched secret bombing raids in Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger ordered the wiretapping of his home telephone.

When someone picked up the phone at the Halperins’ house, a buzzer sounded inside the Old Post Office Building, in Washington, where F.B.I. agents listened in with earphones. Mark Halperin recalled, “My two brothers and I were on the phone all the time, and my little brother had this girlfriend across the street that he used to talk to. Just imagine these poor F.B.I. agents having to sit there and monitor this three-year-old kid on the phone.”

In 1970, after the U.S. invaded Cambodia, Morton Halperin severed his ties to the Nixon White House. Though he no longer had access to classified material, the wiretaps remained on his house for nearly a year longer. During that time, not a single conversation implicated him in any leaks. But in the summer of 1971, after Daniel Ellsberg, another former Nixon aide, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Times, Nixon seemed to become even more suspicious of Halperin. Nixon suspected that secret files had been stashed at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, where Halperin had gone to work. On June 30, 1971, according to White House tapes, Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “to break into the place, rifle the files and bring them out. . . . Go in around 8 or 9 o’clock.”

A watchman at the Brookings Institution reported that soon afterward he turned away two men who tried to walk into the building with attaché cases, saying that they were going “to see Mr. Morton Halperin.” Though no burglary was ever carried out, Nixon’s order marked the beginning of the crimes that culminated in Watergate—a scandal that, with the help of two young reporters and a source called Deep Throat, enshrined the notion of inside dope in American politics. Morton Halperin later wrote several books that explored the anatomy of leaks in Washington and their power. (In “Top Secret,” he wrote, “The harms to national security for which leaking is sometimes blamed have been vastly overstated.”) And according to Mark his father taught him that the role of the media was a simple one: “to hold powerful interests accountable to the public interest.”

By the time Mark joined ABC as an off-air producer, in 1988, his father’s establishment, already fractured over Vietnam, was increasingly being crowded out by a new élite. Whereas that earlier establishment was defined largely by obscure professional policymakers, the new one was defined at least as much by famous professional politicos—pollsters and pundits and media consultants and campaign strategists. And, just as the father had reflected the values of the old establishment, the son embodied the new one.

In 1991, Halperin was assigned to cover a little-known Democratic candidate from Arkansas named William Jefferson Clinton. As he travelled with Clinton’s team from one city to another, Halperin was exposed for the first time to the high-tech craft of the modern campaign. After the nineteen-sixties, as the power of the old party machines eroded, candidates needed new ways to reach voters, and they turned to the medium that could reach them all: television. Nixon, using a team of admen, was one of the first to package himself “like so much toothpaste or detergent,” as Joe McGinnis described this approach in “The Selling of the President.” The emergence of sophisticated public-opinion research made politics even more of a science than an art, and candidates gradually surrounded themselves with a gallery of expert manipulators: pollsters, advertising executives, media consultants, campaign strategists, and direct-mail gurus. As George Stephanopoulos, one of the Clinton campaign’s top strategists, wrote in his memoir, “All Too Human,” “There were still amateurs who loved the game in 1991, but campaigns were now run by professionals.” And these tacticians were becoming as renowned as the candidates—or, as Stephanopoulos put it, “I was also becoming a political celebrity.”

Halperin was introduced, he said, to this “new generation of Democratic-strategist stars.” He also met the country’s top political reporters, many of whom had become versions of what the sociologist David Riesman dubbed the “inside dopester”—someone who knows the “political score as he must know the score in other fields of entertainment, such as sports.” Many of the political reporters, including Halperin, had read Theodore H. White’s book “The Making of the President, 1960,” which had revolutionized campaign coverage. In the past, the process had been a fairly staid affair: a Presidential candidate delivered a stump speech, and the press duly banged out a summary of his remarks on a typewriter. White’s book, in contrast, presents the contest between Kennedy and Nixon as a thrilling, photo-finish horse race. White describes Kennedy watching the election returns in Hyannis Port: “The candidate posed himself in the corner of the room . . . too tense to sit . . . clutching back to back two paperback books.” After that, as Timothy Crouse noted in “The Boys on the Bus,” his book about the reporters following the 1972 Presidential campaign, “most editors were sending off their men with rabid pep talks about the importance of sniffing out inside dope, getting background into the story, finding out what makes the campaign tick.” White himself later came to regret what he had unleashed, saying, “Who gives a fuck if the guy had milk and Total for breakfast?”

More and more, in the seventies and eighties, the press didn’t just report on a campaign; journalists helped influence the outcome. “By reporting a man’s political strengths, they made him a front runner; by mentioning his weaknesses and liabilities, they cut him down,” Crouse wrote. Indeed, he concluded, “The press was no longer simply guessing who might run and who might win; the press was in some way determining these things.”

As reporters grew more focussed on the mechanics of running a campaign, the campaigns themselves fed that curiosity. Chris Lehane, the Democratic strategist, told me, “Most people who cover the campaigns are now much more interested in the horse race. So, from a campaign perspective, you need to literally create good process stuff” to show the press. By 1992, the relationship between the press and the new political professionals had become increasingly symbiotic: the professionals required the media to get out their candidate’s message; the reporters needed the consultants in order to fill their notebooks with colorful details. Accordingly, the campaigns offered the press “exclusive” stories about the struggle over a campaign slogan, or how an as yet unreleased attack ad had been created. In turn, many in the press published stories in which the consultants served as heroes or villains, depending on their tactical prowess. This phenomenon culminated in the Clinton “war room,” a daily gathering of strategists. Ostensibly set up in order to respond to Republican attacks, the meetings quickly became a story in themselves, another titillating drama that also offered proof of the campaign’s strategic superiority. The campaign even opened up the process to documentary cameras; the resulting film, “The War Room,” cemented the idea of the operative as celebrity. (The Los Angeles Times, in its review, called Carville “a natural actor,” with “the starring role he thoroughly deserves.”)

In one scene in the film, which underscores how intertwined reporters and operatives have become, Halperin can be seen conferring with Stephanopoulos moments after a Presidential debate; however, rather than Stephanopoulos briefing Halperin, Halperin appears to be briefing Stephanopoulos. “What I wanted, since I was covering the Clinton campaign, was its instant reaction to what had gone on, without waiting for the aides to emerge from the spin room,” Halperin recalls. “And so what I arranged with George was if he’d agree to leave the greenroom early, during the closing statements of the debate, I’d be willing to tell him what he’d missed, so when he got there he could then spin.”

Halperin, using a handheld camera, made his own documentary about the Clinton campaign, “Elvis and Us,” which was screened at the National Press Club. Meanwhile, he unearthed the kind of salacious details that campaigns still tried to conceal. Halperin was the first reporter to ask Clinton directly about Gennifer Flowers. Weeks later, ABC obtained perhaps the most potent piece of inside dope of the campaign: a letter that Clinton had sent to a colonel, during the Vietnam War, saying, “Thank you . . . for saving me from the draft.” Halperin handed a copy to Stephanopoulos and Begala on a runway in New Hampshire and said, “Nobody else has this. Read it right away. We’re going to need a response.” Begala recalls, “I still remember my eyes settling on that sentence—that’s when my knees buckled.” Halperin said, “It was a little bit heady and overwhelming at that point in my career to deal with something that high-stakes.”

As Halperin was flourishing inside the new establishment, his father’s career was foundering. After the election, Clinton nominated Morton Halperin to be an Assistant Secretary of Defense. Halperin later told National Public Radio that he hoped to use the position to “try to do things which really do affect people’s lives, to try to reduce some of the amount of suffering.” Many stalwarts of the old establishment backed him, including two former Secretaries of State, four former Secretaries of Defense, and two former C.I.A. chiefs.

Nevertheless, Halperin was quickly set upon by conservative partisans and their operatives, who tried to use his nomination to subvert Clinton and, in the process, destroy Halperin’s character. They used leaks and innuendo to hint that the C.I.A. had “a secret dossier,” which disclosed his “subversive activities.” Though the C.I.A. insisted that no such dossier existed, unnamed sources claimed they had “heard” accusations that included the words “killer” and “traitor.” “It’s very hard for the truth to catch up with a lie,” Halperin complained at the time.

Yet, for many reporters in Washington, it was simply another scandalous story. Al Kamen, who now writes the Washington Post’s “In the Loop” column—which, as a chronicle of the doings of lobbyists and political consultants, is, in many ways, a prototype of The Note—wrote, with another reporter, a story about the smearing. Its lead encapsulates the inside dopester’s world view: “It’s high Washington drama.” Morton Halperin eventually withdrew his name from consideration.

Mark Halperin, meanwhile, continued to rise at ABC. In 1997, he was named the news division’s political director. One evening three years later, in a testament to his status, Vice-President Al Gore, who was then running for President, stopped by the Upper West Side apartment that Halperin shares with Avrich, near Central Park, trailed by the Secret Service and his campaign staff. “I led him upstairs and offered him a Heineken,” Halperin recalled. “He asked me who I thought he was going to pick as a running mate, and I said, ‘Gephardt.’ He said, ‘Why?’ And then I showed him some of my political memorabilia and we drank our beers and chatted for a while.”

By 2000, the strategists who had once advised a candidate solely during a campaign had moved into Congress and the White House. Pat Caddell, a strategist for Jimmy Carter, who regularly attended White House staff meetings, wrote a ten-thousand-word memo that argued, “In devising a strategy for the Administration, it is important to recognize we cannot successfully separate politics and government. . . . It is my thesis that governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.” The advent of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and the Internet also required strategists to adapt to a constant news cycle. Stephanopoulos told me, “Everyone said that our campaign war room in 1991 was the fastest. Now it would be considered Paleolithic.”

Toward the end of 2000, to help ABC reporters and producers stay abreast, Halperin and his staff in the political unit began to collect their own reporting, together with information from other publications, into a single internal document. This became the model for The Note, and, inevitably, it was soon leaked throughout Washington. “People were desperate to get hold of it,” Lehane said.

“It’s like with the movies,” Halperin told me. “People have developed an interest in the behind-the-scenes details, the box-office totals, who’s the producer. With politics, people are interested in process and personality.” Eventually, as readers began passing the document along to friends without permission, ABC decided to post it, free, on its Web site. It was the birth of “a monster,” as the Times said, approvingly.

On October 19, 2002, Halperin and his colleagues published the quintessential Note story. Headlined “On Your Marks,” it hailed the beginning of the race for the White House, two years ahead of the election. Pointing out that “the clock is ticking,” it declared, “We are focussing on what’s really going to matter over the next few months: fundraising, travel, staffing, timetables for decision-making, and setting up the necessary bank accounts.” It then ranked all the candidates by various categories. The categories included “money potential,” “message/issues,” “television campaigning skills,” “buzz and momentum,” “polling/name ID,” “endorsements,” and “staff/consultants.” (At that early date, Richard Gephardt was in the over-all statistical lead by less than four tenths of a point.) The rankings, which became one of The Note’s most popular features, represented the apotheosis of the new inside culture. Though there may be greater partisanship in Washington today, politics is treated by many in the political class as a battle less of ideology than of methodology, of pure technique. The media, likewise, no longer regard the selling of the President as an insult; instead, it is a compliment. There is virtue in stagecraft. (“Hats off to the White House communication team for handling the run-up and staging of this so well,” The Note wrote of the Administration’s decision to orchestrate an Oval Office meeting between President Bush and members of the 9/11 Commission.) Even dirty tactics are admired. In one instance, The Note praised the way a public-relations team had mounted a “six-day media plan” to burnish the image of Saudi Arabia, which was being criticized for its connections to terrorism. “The scheme you came up with is so clever, we think it should be used as a case study in political campaign management schools.”

Readers of The Note have tried to decode its political ideology. Halperin makes a point of not voting, which has contributed to the speculation. James Carville sometimes suspects that Halperin is a Republican, while the conservative Washington Times has claimed that he “leans liberal.” Yet, as is the case with many publications today, The Note’s principal allegiance is not to ideas but to the cult of the scoop and to the notion that success trumps all other values. And those who treat politics too seriously, who do not see the world with the cool detachment of the pros, are suspect. Earlier this year, The Note expressed bewilderment at those in “the goo-goo establishment”—including David Broder, a longtime political reporter at the Washington Post—who were naïve enough to try to fix the campaign-finance system. To do more than keep score is to be seen as a sucker. Indeed, The Note recently mocked the Times’ editorial board for being “super excited about the substance of the VP debate.”

One person who has worked on The Note told me, “The process of politics is seen as an end in itself.” This approach was most vividly on display during the Democratic primaries, when The Note helped fuel the Howard Dean bubble because the Dean campaign seemed to embody the most innovative process—its focus on Internet outreach efforts suggested a twenty-first-century war room. In interviews, Halperin touted such triumphs as Dean’s surprise “endorsement by Gore” and “his money advantage,” much of which came through Internet fund-raising, and which made him all but the “prohibitive favorite.” One experienced campaign reporter, explaining why The Note and so many other reporters were wrong about Dean, told me, “It was because the Dean campaign was so effective at feeding all the political reporters the bullshit process. It was process, process, process.” And The Note doesn’t hype just the campaigns that channel the process; it does the same with reporters who write about it. One magazine reporter told me, “I always try to get my stuff cited in The Note, but it’s policy stuff, so they’ll almost never include it.”

More and more, The Note assumes the voice of the operative, with his insular language and morally neutral jargon. Along with talking about “segments” and “ad buys” and “traction,” The Note will present its reporting in the style of draft memos from one campaign consultant to another. In her book “Ten Minutes from Normal,” Karen Hughes, the Bush adviser, wrote, “Another trend that troubles me is that the media are increasingly becoming virtual participants—instead of observers—in the political process. This is especially evident in a daily political briefing called The Note.” Hughes then criticized The Note’s habit of offering advice to candidates, as it did in June, 2003, when it urged Democratic Presidential candidates in the Senate to filibuster against Bush’s E.P.A. nominee. Sometimes the campaigns seem, if not to heed The Note’s advice, then at least to adopt its words, as when a Kerry spokesman recently charged the Bush team of using “Googling monkeys” to dig up dirt.

As the media have taken on the role of the operative—conducting their own polls and focus groups, as well as welcoming former strategists into their ranks—they have become perhaps the most important faction in the Gang of 500. Accordingly, Halperin garlands reporters with their own Teddy White-like epithets: “the legendary Elizabeth Drew,” the “unportly pepperpot Doug Jehl,” the “poet/historian Adam Nagourney.” The Note will describe articles as having “a Finemanian” world view, or offering a “Milbankian” style. And what the political press says is nearly always “seismic” or “boffo.”

Halperin recognizes that it is corrosive for the press to treat a campaign as mere spectacle. On October 8th, he wrote a memorandum to colleagues at ABC that seemed to reflect his ambivalence about the tone of American political coverage. “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes [sic] all the time, but these are not central to his effort to win,” he wrote. In contrast, Halperin argued, the Bush campaign hopes “to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.” He noted, “We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.” Though the memo was somewhat overstated and crudely expressed, it tried to do what The Note almost never does: make a moral distinction. Predictably, the memo was quickly leaked and posted on The Drudge Report, with the headline “ABC News Political Director Memo Sparks Controversy: Both Sides Not ‘Equally Accountable.’ ” Before long, it had generated its own mini-scandal, as the story spread through the blogosphere, where it was seen as confirmation of liberal media bias. On the conservative Web site Free Republic, a reader posted the message “Halperin’s head should roll.” Laura Ingraham recited from the memo on her radio show; the document was also quoted damningly by Fox News and the New York Post. Conservatives, meanwhile, tried to start a campaign to flood ABC’s Web site with messages, thereby shutting it down. Rather than change today’s media culture, the memo simply reinforced it.

Halperin refused to comment directly on the incident. However, he had told me, “In American political life, what is always creams what ought to be.” I asked him how The Note would cover his father’s era. He was silent, then said, “I couldn’t even answer that.” Another time, he said, “The dumbing-down, lowest-common-denominator dynamic that cable and Internet and tabloid culture have brought means that anything that is big and exclusive and legitimate is quickly turned into something trivial, tawdry, and dumbed-down. If we had the most consequential scoop of all times about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration, it would quickly turn into ‘How’s it polling? What are they saying about it on Drudge? What are they saying about it on “Hannity & Colmes”?’ And it would be reduced to its cheapest, most ephemeral essence.” He continued, “Just imagine Deep Throat during the current age. On cable TV every day there’d be guessing games on who it was. Bob Woodward would be staked out, and there would be profiles and journalistic stories about the journalism and was it ethical and how many sources did they have. You’d have a countdown clock on some cable channel of when Nixon’s going to resign. You’d have Web sites with endless speculation about who Deep Throat was, and critiques of the language, and textual analysis of every Woodward and Bernstein story. All of that would serve to dilute and diminish not just the exclusivity of the scoop but the importance of the underlying story.”

Yet perhaps the ultimate consequence of The Note’s style of political coverage is not the trivialization of important stories but, rather, the inflation of trivial ones. With the media’s ever-growing appetite for new information, there has been a gradual slackening of the definition of political inside dope. A little story—Killer Joe Lockhart’s hiring, say, or Karl Rove’s breakfast strategy sessions—is presented as a big story on The Note, an “absolute must read.” (Halperin’s own memo was hailed in the blogosphere as a “Rathergate-style bombshell.”) But, as Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, says of The Note, “It couldn’t be more transient, like all gossip; but in politics, as in finance, gossip acquires the authority of superstition.”

Later in the morning of that first day of the Republican Convention, after Halperin filed The Note, he roamed the floor along with other reporters. Because conventions no longer choose the parties’ nominees, they have mainly become a vehicle for stagecraft, for branding. “So far, there isn’t a whole lot of real news,” Halperin said.

Still, there were hundreds of reporters looking for something. They had taken over entire wings and floors and corridors of Madison Square Garden. An estimated fifteen thousand media people were present—more than six times the number of delegates. Some reporters were from imitators of The Note. CNN had started The Morning Grind; CBS had The Washington Wrap; NBC had lured away one of Halperin’s original co-authors, Elizabeth Wilner, to start First Read. The Note, in turn, had recently launched Noted Now, which posts instant bulletins day and night—“a twenty-four-hour Note,” as Halperin called it.

There were so many insiders that, it seemed, there were no outsiders anymore. By noon, many reporters at the Convention had already read that morning’s Note and come up to Halperin to talk about it. A reporter from the Washington Post, whose story had been cited, said, “Thanks for the mention.”

“Always a pleasure,” Halperin said.

The night before, Halperin and the Post reporter had both attended a birthday party for John McCain, at which various fixtures of the media establishment had turned up: Tim Russert, Barbara Walters, Judy Woodruff, Chris Matthews. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” Halperin said. He recalled that he had been seated next to McCain’s aunt. “I was sitting on one side, and Charlie Rose was sitting on the other. It was pretty wild.”

As he moved through the arena, reporters and delegates kept asking him questions about what the real inside story was, what hidden clue he had slipped into that day’s edition. Meanwhile, his single question about a potential shakeup in the Kerry campaign was starting to reverberate throughout the Convention. “That’s catnip to the right,” Halperin told me. “I take floating that kind of stuff really seriously.” He went on, “I heard enough things from enough people in a way that I was comfortable floating that in the way we did, and we didn’t say anything explicit. But I knew it would send off alarm bells.”

Indeed, within twenty-four hours the rumor had been repeated on the Internet and on cable TV. While Kerry was trying to focus his message on what was happening in Iraq and on the economy, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer seized upon the shakeup story. “Happening now, a call to shake up the Kerry campaign,” Blitzer declared. “Why some Democrats are pushing for a change at the highest levels. Stand by for hard news on ‘Wolf Blitzer Reports.’ ”

During the segment, he continued, “Joining us now, our senior political correspondent, Candy Crowley. You’ve been doing some serious reporting on this. How serious is this proposal to once again shake up the Kerry campaign?” Crowley said the campaign insisted that there would be “no major shakeups.”

“All right,” Blitzer said. “We’ll see what has to be done, what will be done, if anything. Candy Crowley, thanks very much. We’ll get more insight into this possible, possible shakeup inside the Kerry campaign later this hour.”

Not long afterward, political reporters surrounded Terry McAuliffe, the D.N.C. chairman, at an event in New York. “It’s not a shakeup,” he said. “I don’t know how that rumor got started.” Forty-eight hours after The Note first planted it, the Boston Globe reported “a surge of strategizing and speculation about a shakeup,” and the Boston Herald said that “rumors of a top-level staff shakeup,” including the firing of the campaign manager, were “rattling Kerry’s island interlude.” At the same time, reporters and delegates continued to question Halperin about the story that he had unleashed. “I got Kerry people calling and saying, ‘What’s the deal—am I being fired?’ ” Halperin said.

Finally, Kerry dispatched his top team of specialists—his campaign manager, his senior strategist, his pollster—to New York in order to signal to reporters that no campaign staffers were being fired. The only change was that some former Clinton strategists had been hired to build a more effective rapid-response team, which could quell rumors like the one about the shakeup.

Meanwhile, The Note offered snap judgments about the impact of the ongoing Convention in a “scorecard,” arguing that “in our 24/7-cable-Internet-talk show politico-media culture, the only way to be anywhere close to first in offering an evaluation of anything in American politics is to rush beyond any sense of propriety or horse sense to analyze and dissect before an event is even over.” The Note also assessed the impact of its speculation about changes in the Kerry campaign, without acknowledging its own role in propagating the rumor and in contributing to the need for such a war room. The Note wrote that the Kerry story had successfully nudged the campaign “off message enough so that the Democratic storyline for the week is ‘campaign shakeup’ rather than convention response.”

In the long run, Halperin told me, the new rapid-response team would be essential in creating “a narrative” that Kerry was gaining momentum. “Kerry isn’t the best Presidential candidate ever, and, in my professional judgment, he didn’t have the horses around him to win this,” he said. “Now he does.”

Before the Convention ended, Halperin walked down to the floor and appeared briefly on ABC alongside Stephanopoulos, who is now one of the network’s major political reporters. They chatted with their jackets off and their shirt sleeves rolled up, and rated some speeches, including the address of Rudolph Giuliani. “I give it an eight,” Halperin said. He made several points about the dynamics of the election, but afterward he told me what he considered the most important one: “The worst thing that can happen to a candidate is to lose control of his public image.”

Halperin glanced at his BlackBerry, checking his messages. Then his phone rang, and his voice rose over the din. “Are you sure?” he said. “Can we use that?” ♦

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